Created in 2019, “DEAR —” is a living archive of letters & a chapbook addressing themes of justice, art-making, and intergenerational healing. grounded in experiences of the wwii-era incarceration of the japanese american community, “Dear—” is curated by Brynn saito in collaboration with Densho.
Densho, a Seattle-based grassroots organization, is dedicated to preserving, educating, and sharing the story of World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans in order to deepen understandings of American history and inspire action for equity. “Dear—” was also produced with the support of the Santa Fe Art Institute and the College of Arts and Humanities at California State University, Fresno.
More on the project from the Densho blog.
Signing chapbooks at the February 2020 project launch.
Process notes, poem drafts, images from the Densho Digital Repository, cranes, and quotes pinned to my studio walls at the Santa Fe Art Institute’s “Truth and Reconciliation Residency,” where I assembled this project.
My dad, Gregg Saito, in front of the memorial monument on the sovereign land of the Gila River Indian Community (GRIC), where his parents were incarcerated during WWII. Out of respect for the GRIC, we refrained from taking photographs of the land. Sketches were allowed. This sketch was composed by artist and writer, Manivone Sayasone, based on a photograph.
In the spring of 1942, my grandmother, Alma Teranishi, and my grandfather, Mitsuo Saito, were forced from their homes in California’s Central Valley and sent to a prison camp built on the sovereign land of the Gila River Indian Community (GRIC) in southern Arizona. They met, married, and had a daughter while imprisoned. Along with over 120,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans, Mitsuo and Alma were imprisoned in another massive, illegal violation of freedom later attributed to “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
Nearly eight decades later, in the summer of 2019, my father, Gregg Saito, and I visited the living ruins of the Butte and Canal camps with the generous accompaniment of Mr. Cody Cerna and Mr. Wally Jones, two guides from the GRIC. We also visited the memorial in Poston, AZ, a site of Japanese American wartime imprisonment built on the Colorado River Indian Reservation.
Afterwards, my father boarded a plane in Phoenix and flew home to Fresno, CA. I continued eastward to a writing residency in Santa Fe, visiting other sites associated with the WWII incarceration of family and elders.
“Dear—” emerged from correspondences with family and friends in the time immediately following the journey I took with my father. The project bloomed to include correspondences with friends and fellow poets and writers based in California’s San Joaquin Valley (and beyond). Writing workshops were held with participants and the project launched with a community reading at the United Japanese Christian Church in Clovis, CA on February 8, 2020.
Besides this site, which hosts the “living letter archive,” I also produced a chapbook of poetry, images, and letters, published with the support of the Densho Artists Initiative grant.